Film: The Fish Child
Release date: 17th January 2011
Certificate: 15
Running time: 96 mins
Director: Lucía Puenzo
Starring: Ines Efron, Mariela Vitale, Carlos Bardem, Diego Velazquez, Pep Munné
Genre: Crime/Drama/Romance/Thriller
Studio: Peccadillo
Format: DVD
Country: Argentina/France/Spain
The writer/director of the synopsis-defying Argentine intersexuality melodrama XXY follows up her directorial debut with this adaptation of her own novel. With Inés Efron returning as another gay protagonist, Puenzo this time treads more traditional ground with her lesbian noir drama, but is the result Argentina’s answer to the Wachowshi brothers’ Bound or a case of a difficult second album depreciating the promise of the first?
We meet Lala already wrapped in an illicit affair with a maid under her parents’ pay. Her inferior in both class and race, the one thing they have in common is their gender, and so these star-crossed lovers spend much of their time together dreaming of finally eloping.
Lala begins to lay the foundation for their escape by stealing many of her wealthy parents’ less noticeable possessions and giving them to her lover to pawn, but when Lala’s father mysteriously dies, the two find themselves with a mountain of evidence against them and no-one willing to listen to their story.
As Lala tries to clear her innocent lover’s name, she finds herself confessing her own sins, and revealing truths neither of them are ready to expose…
Dropping its audience in to the central relationship after many of its most potentially dramatic developments have been and gone (the point where the affluent daughter falls for the family’s serving girl), the film begins with many languid, atmospheric scenes where very little happens, and which are often allowed to go on for some time before immediately cutting to the next uneventful scene.
The incoherent pace leads to a similarly nonsensical plot (not helped by often unreadable subtitles, typically causing problems during the most pivotal scenes), and even the most culturally equipped viewer will spend a large part of the film completely unaware that half of it is actually occurring in flashback (the moment of epiphany where this occurs to the viewer could have actually been a great narrative device, if the director wasn’t clearly blindly assuming everybody was still following).
The often anaemic storytelling leaves the audience adrift for far too long before answering such basic questions as ‘who’s who?’, ‘what are their relationships’ and ‘why should I care?’ A director not in any rush to give the audience too much of a handle on the proceedings can often have interesting, atmospheric results, but when partnered with an expectation that the audience can then leap head-long in to a complex narrative with nobody to latch on to, it makes the end product too confusing, and ultimately exasperates.
The Fish Child disappoints because it actually shows plenty of promise. After the false-start in establishing the dramatic situation, there unravels a solid ‘princess and the pauper’ doomed romance, where the latter member of that equation finds themselves tugged in several directions, and often exploited by the family she serves. The tender romance slowly shifts to unearth a sadistically dark underbelly, and, in the process, there are several standout scenes when the film finds a firm foot-hold in the story long enough to tell it (one such scene being surprisingly supernatural appearance of the titular child). The problem is that while the words ‘Lesbian Noir Thriller’ roll so easily off the tongue, Puenzo only scores two out of three in this film as, while the film begins by moving too quickly for anyone to keep up, it then settles in to a leisurely tempo, and provides plot twists too predictable to be genuinely ‘thrilling’.
There’s plenty of intrigue in this film for it to be of interest, and while it often fails to deliver on its promises, Lucía Puenzo is not on the list of Argentine directors you’d be wise to ignore. But given her impressive prior work, The Fish Child represents an overall disappointing work from an artist we’ve been given reason to expect more from. JB
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